Still More from Eurobike

A final wrap on all the killer new bikes and gear we found at Eurobike in Germany.

matt phillips

The merry design-gnomes at Crank Brothers have been busy. The highlight of their booth was the not-ready-for-primetime wheelsets. That's right, Crank Brothers is showing the wheels, but providing no date for their release. The wheels, which the company has been working on for around two-years so far, are still in development and will be released when Crank Bros is good and ready.

The structure of the wheels is very interesting. Except for the valve hole, the rim in not drilled. As Mavic learned with their Fore technology rims are stiffer and more durable with unbroken rim walls. That and it's easily made air tight for tubeless tire compatibility. Unfortunately for everyone else, Mavic has a patent on perhaps the most straightforward method of making a rim without interior spoke holes.

Crank Brothers decided to go one better than Mavic and forgo all rim wall drilling (except for the valve hole). Instead, the rims have a raised rib, which is bored transversely for spoking and acts as a stiffening agent as well.

A barrel inserted through the bore in the rib provides the spoke head anchors for the paired, straight-pull spokes. Coming from the hub side are, essentially super-long aluminum nipples.

The wheels look very unique, but are there advantages? There's rim stiffness (which should boost wheel stiffness), rim durability spoke durability (straight pull spokes have fewer fatigue failures at the head than 'j' bend spokes) and tubeless compatibility.

Being Crank Brothers, they couldn't leave the good old quick release well enough alone either. Basically, they sawed a wide QR lever in half. Crank says that splitting the lever and closing it in a two-step process, the hand effort necessary to attain a giving clamping force is reduced by about half. To put it in numbers (totally arbitrary numbers - just for the sake of example): say it takes a hand effort of 10 to reach a camping force of 25 with a standard QR. The hand effort to close each of Cranks leverlets would be 5, but when they're both closed, you still have a clamping force of 25. It works in reverses also. Hopefully this design will reduce the number of people who loosely clamp their wheels because they're not strong enough to attain proper clamping forces, or have difficulty opening a properly tightened QR.

Another fun thing running round Crank's booth was their much closer to reality (expected delivery is October) headsets. In another nifty bit of thinking, Crank figured out a way to eliminate extra material in a headset. Instead of thinking of the headset in two parts, a self-contained bearing and a cup; Crank's headset cup is the bearing. What you see on the outside is the outer race of the bearing. Despite being made almost completely of steel, Crank says their headsets are 30-40% lighter than other headsets because they eliminated so much material. For instance, the Cobalt SL headset, $130, which is made from stainless steel weighs 65 grams. For comparison, a Chris King headset, which costs about the same, is about 100 grams.

For you weight weenies, you can bow down to the 58 gram Cobalt Ti, which has a 6/4 titanium upper/outer cup/race (aren't slashies fun?), but is otherwise the same as the Cobalt SL - oh, except for the $300 price tag.

The headset line is broken down into Cobalt (XC), Iodine (All-Mtn), Opium (DH) and Sage (FR) - demarcations that Crank will be using to identify the intended use of all their products going forward (except pedals for now). Except for the Cobalt Ti, each line has a stainless steel version (SL) for $130, and a bearing steel version (C) for $90. The headsets are tuned for a specific use by adjusting he number of balls per bearing - more balls in a bearing, more durable. The Sage line also has a 1.5" version of the C. If you were paying attention that means it's made from bearing steel and costs $90.

Though they aren't a new product, this was my first opportunity to view the 5 shift/derailleur system in person. Instead of cables, 5 uses hydraulic pressure to actuate the derailleurs. The system looks amazing and shifting is smoother than you could imagine. It's also very hard to get. Christoph Muthers, the man behind 5, makes only a handful per year and charges 1500 Euro for a set, that's more than two grand in US dollars.

Other people have experimented with hydraulic shifting in the past - several years ago a company called SAFE Products had a kit which replaced the cables and housing on your Shimano drivetrain with hydraulics.

Why hydro? It's completely sealed from the elements, it should be incredibly precise because you're not constantly fighting cable stretch/housing compression and it should be silky smooth. With disc brakes anyway, it's clear that hydraulic smack the snot out of cables and housing in nearly every way, so perhaps the same is true with shifting.

However, unless a Shimano, SRAM or Campy gabs the reigns and fully develops hydraulic shifting we'll probably never know. In fact, the chances of hydro replacing cables and housing at this point are pretty slim. The next great leap in shifting technology is probably electronic, as both Shimano and Campy have been experimenting with it quite publicly.

If you look back at the past 4-5 Cervelo reviews in Bicycling, you'll notice that the company seems to know a thing or two about making bikes we like. I had an opportunity to spend some time on a SLC-SL this summer and… wow. Just, wow. So, when Cervelo comes out with something new, I pay attention. The new kid on Cervelo's block is the RS. Based on the popular R3, the RS features geometry adjustments for a more comfortable riding position. Cervelo, being Cervelo couldn't simply increase the headtube length of the R3 and call it good. People loved the way the R3 handled, and Cervelo wanted to maintain it. Simply lengthening the head tube would alter the handling so they made other geometry changes, such as lengthening the stays slightly, to mimic the R3's rider-weight distribution and handling, but with higher (the RS head tube is 2cm taller than the R3's), more comfortable bars. In addition, the RS has curved seat stays for a bit more vertical compliance.

Cervelo is very careful to point out that the RS is intended to have all the performance of an R3 - it's not some old-persons cruiser. In fact, some CSC riders will be on the RS. If the RS is popular enough, Cervelo will build an SL version

For the wee-folks, the RS size run includes an XS size, with 650c wheels, to eliminate toe-clip overlap.